CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Barma, Anna |
|---|---|
| Title | The Self Illusion |
| Summary | The concern of this thesis is the possible transformation of subjective experience at a deep psychological and emotional level. The argument is that a particular feature of our experience is an illusion. This feature is what in Indian philosophy called atman, and can be translated as self. This self can be characterized as an unchanging, persistent, unified, substantial subject, or in terms of the experience of ‘I’, ‘me’, and ‘mine’. The contribution of Buddhist philosophy is the claim that the self is an illusion in asmuchas there is nothing in our experience, if we pay very close attention to it, which in fact corresponds to this idea of self. I defend that the Buddhist denial involves not merely a refutation of a narrow and irrelevant conceptualization of the self, but a relevant aspect of our experience – which is what makes transformation possible upon losing the self. Furthermore, the Buddhist denial is not nihilistic, because it implies not an end, but an alteration of experience. This also makes it possible to speak more substantively about the kind of subjectivity ‘left over’ after losing the self – and I do this by drawing on the Daoist philosophy in the Zhuangzi, which can be characterized in terms of non-duality or losing the distinction between self and other. However, this does not undermine the need for engaging with the kind of self denied in Buddhism, because that is the very thing which stands in the way of realizing this subjectivity. |
| Supervisor | Weberman, David S. |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/barma_anna.pdf |
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